


We Were Never Young

by lasttraintocentral



Series: No Ghostless Place [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: M/M, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-28
Updated: 2014-07-28
Packaged: 2018-02-10 18:59:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2036400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lasttraintocentral/pseuds/lasttraintocentral
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Washington, Steve Rogers is looking for a home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Were Never Young

There were more than two hundred miles between Washington, D.C. and Brooklyn.  
  
More than three days by foot.  
  
More than four hours by car.  
  
Those two hundred miles were more than Steve Rogers had patience for by the time he was on his way there.

Natasha's latest intel had been vague at best, but her word was gold in Steve's books these days.

When she had left him news of an unwashed, "homeless" man fitting Barnes description wandering the streets of New York, Steve hadn’t bothered with questions or second guesses. His bag was packed and he was on his bike before he even contemplated picking up a phone to let anyone know. Not that there were many people keeping tabs these days, what with the destruction of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s entire infrastructure.

 Well over a five months had passed since the helicarriers had been laid to waste and, as he had in the past, Bucky had vanished off the face of the earth. Or at least the face of Steve's.

No matter where he looked or who he spoke to the Winter Soldier had managed to once again become a ghost story. Even with the decimated blocks of Washington concrete that suggested otherwise. 

It was with an almost unparalleled reluctance that he finally reached out to Natasha and Clint, asking for any and all aide their contacts may bring. Their utter disbelief had been the easiest of what he knew he would have to swallow, easier than the pushing, and prodding, and questions.

There were so many questions.

Was he sure the Winter Soldier was alive?

Yes.

What on god's green earth made him think the Winter Soldier had saved him?

There was no one else there who could have.

Why the ever living hell, Clint's verbalizations became more colourful as they went on, did he think that things were different and the Winter Soldier wouldn't try and kill him this time?

Because they were and he wouldn't, and would they please stop calling him that. 

His impatience had grown with each pointless inquiry. Why couldn't they understand that finding Bucky was what really mattered? 

One more question.

He had agreed to one, but two would get an arrow up Clint's nose.

Could he do what was necessary and kill the Winter Soldier if it came to that?

Steve Rogers had never wanted to hit another of the Avengers before, unless you counted Tony which he didn't, because no sane person didn't want to hit Tony; Clint was making a serious case to be the first however.

In the end the promised pay off had far outweighed putting up with the judgemental inquiries and disbelieving stares.  
  
In the end he was going to bring home Bucky.

By the time he was traveling the Staten Island Expressway the sky was growing grey with something unpleasant coming in from along the coast. He’d left without so much as a thought to the weather, and hoped whatever was coming managed to hold out long enough for him to find shelter in Brooklyn.

The first chance he had had two years ago, after what Tony so kindly referred to as The Great Thaw, he had hunted down the old apartment he and Bucky had shared before the war.  
  
The building still stood, but from photos he knew it had seen better days.  
  
The plan had been to restore it, to provide temporary housing to families trying to get back on their feet.  
  
One of the perks of being an icicle for seventy years was that life before the war was as vivid a memory as breakfast that day.  
  
As clearly as Steve remembered his eggs, bacon and toast, he remembered the depression.  
  
He remembered how hard his mother had worked to put food on the table with her husband gone and a teenaged boy.  
  
He remembered how tirelessly she smiled when he asked if Bucky could come for dinner, and how she made sure the boys were both fed to their fill before she even thought about eating anything.  
  
It was painful to look back now, wondering how many nights she had gone to bed on an empty stomach just to see her son happy.

There wasn’t much Steve could do to honour Sarah Rogers over seven decades after her passing, but he was going to _try_.  
  
This building, it was going to be the one thing he could _do_.  
  
He knew that life with him was never the easiest, not for Sarah and in time not for Bucky. His mother had loved them though, her boys as she’d called them, both of them. As far as she had been concerned they were all family, and family had been everything to her. If he could use the life he had now to help other families in need, it was a small price to pay to make her proud.  
  
Despite all the truth in his motives though, there was a small knot of guilt eating at him whenever he thought of that building, the guilt that questioned every other motive because of one selfish act.

He had never intended to let anyone else set foot in the apartment he had shared with Bucky.

In 2012 he had told himself it was simply too painful to contemplate.  
  
It was too much to think about _other people_ in that place.  
  
 _Their_ joys, _their_ accomplishments, _their_ defeats and utter anguish all vibrating around between walls that had been Steve and Bucky’s home.  
  
It grabbed at his heart and squeezed to even consider the thought of someone in the small, single bedroom they had shared, or standing over the stove like Bucky had so many nights.  
  
The ledge of the street facing window was _Steve’s_ place and no one else’s.  
  
 _His_ space to watch the world, to sketch anything he desired, and to listen to his friend regale him with tales of the docks and nights Steve had been to ill to go along to the music hall.

Rather suddenly it felt like a hundred years ago Steve had thought those things.  
It felt foolish to have ever believed that Bucky really was gone.  
  
His friend had promised to be there until the end of the line, and Steve had learned two things since then.

1)The end of the line seemed to be a lot farther off than he had ever known, and..

2) James Buchanan Barnes was a man of his word, even when he didn’t mean to be.

In the two years since, the world had managed to shift completely from under his feet again.  
  
Steve had paid Fury ten dollars over a Helicarrier and these days he was feeling like he owed the former Director another ten, or fifty.  
  
Men could fall from train tracks on mountain sides and survive to become ruthless, brain-washed HYDRA assassins.  
  
 _That_ seemed a tad more impressive than hovering airstrips.  
  
All it had taken was one moment.  
  
That mask hitting the pavement had changed every reason Steve planned to keep that apartment to himself.

Bucky was going to need a home.  
  
Bucky was going to need somewhere he knew, somewhere he could feel _safe_.  
  
If Steve had to spend a small fortune restoring every exact detail of that place just to help him remember a fraction of life before war, and Zola, and super-soldier serums, Steve knew that he would.  
  
If he had to trek half way across the country just to find one last semi-functioning ’38 Hotpoint refrigerator he was willing to.  
  
It was a stupid thing to dream, and he knew it, but he couldn’t help but wish it could all be so simple.

A million thoughts of Bucky and that apartment consumed him the last sixteen miles of road.  
  
The wind had come in along the way, growing vicious as it billowed from the looming clouds that were now taking up most of the sky.  
  
He had passed a dozen better places to take up shelter than that mess of a building, but if he was going to delayed searching for the former Sergeant, then it was the only place he wanted to be.  
  
With the location of Bucky’s last sighting from Natasha’s sources, it was possibly the most convenient. He had been in a neighbourhood nearby, alone and wandering the streets. Steve hoped, as he parked his bike and climbed the front stairs to the entrance, that if nothing else his friend still had enough sense to find shelter from the coming storm.

The other side of the heavy front door felt like a void. 

Everything was different.

Every visible inch showed that time had marched on.

The entryway, the dust laden stairwell, the peeling walls all covered in a riot of colourful graffiti tags he couldn’t for the life of him make out. Somewhere on the main floor, he was sure he would find a boarded up window or two. 

Yet standing there felt like 1941 all over again.

It had been Bucky’s idea to get him out of his mother’s place.  
  
At first it had only been a passing suggestion, a joke that it was time they settle down and get a place of their own.  
  
Steve had laughed it off, grateful his friend could still make him laugh at the most difficult of times.  
  
After a couple months though, the suggestion had become insistent. A demand made out of concern.  
  
There had still been too many cases of the flu or trouble with his lungs, and Bucky’d refused to see him alone all cooped up in the place he had shared with his mother.  
  
Bucky hadn’t even entertained the idea that Steve could be there all alone with no one to know how sick he was.  
  
So, by the middle of August, before summer had started to give way to crisp September, Bucky had taken work at the docks and found them a new home.

When he could finally will his feet to move, Steve headed for the stairs.  
  
He smiled to himself at the familiar feel of the railing beneath his fingertips and the way the wooden steps groaned softly under his feet.  
  
It had all looked so grand the first time he had climbed those stairs.  
  
The place could only just pass for middle class if you tilted your head and squinted, but it was all they could afford.  
  
It didn’t matter.  
  
Bucky had found this place.  
  
Bucky had chosen their new home.  
  
To Steve in those days, that was everything, that made it bigger and brighter than any coat of paint or expensive furniture ever could have.  
  
Even after skyscrapers, Helicarriers, a government funded place to rest his head, and decades of decay, _this_ was better.  
  
This place remained big, and beautiful and still the only one he wanted to call home.

The second floor hallway’s condition was only marginally bettered by the fact that most squatters had kept to the ground floor for an easy getaway.  
  
The walls were still marked in neon sprays and carpeting had become matted and dense with years of pacing feet and strange stains he refused to dwell too deeply on.  
  
Their door was in front of him before Steve was even ready for it to be, but it had become impossible to miss over the years.  
  
Even if he hadn’t recognized the numbers that had left light impressions before falling and leaving their brothers behind, there was something about the giant red, white and blue shield painted haphazardly across the surface with two gravestone style date markers that gave it away 

They knew.

People knew what this place was.

Most importantly, to him at least, they knew this place hadn’t just been his.  
  
The first set of dates had read July 4, 1918 - May 4, 1945.  
  
Steve hadn't even been 27 years old, and it struck him as strange that it had never even occurred to him before then.  
  
The man memorialized beneath him however _had_ been. He’d been so close to 28 that there was a strange ache in his chest at the very thought.  
  
Neither of them had seen their birthdays that year. Neither of them had seen the end of the war.  
  
Forget the 70 years he had been on ice, in 1945 he had already missed too much.

The silence of the building pounded in his ears over the howling wind and cars passing outside.  
  
All Steve could hear was the emptiness, everything that was no longer there.  
  
There weren’t the pounding feet of the two little girls who seemed to endlessly chase each other up and down the length of the hall.  
  
The screaming couple next door were probably long ago buried somewhere, close enough to each other that it would have made them miserable.  
  
It no longer smelled like the meals of a dozen different families with just the faintest hint of garbage from someone who dropped theirs in the hall.  
  
All signs of life, at least the ones he remembered, had been utterly eradicated and it made it that much more difficult to push open the apartment door.

At the end of the hall to his right was a window overlooking the street, his only source of light, and it grew dimmer with each passing moment as the wind smacked the branches of a nearby tree against the glass.

He scowled at the window, feeling as though the noise was some how attempting to egg him on, which was hardly a logical thing to think; it was simply a tree.

It was startling how easily the door pushed open, hardly a groan in protest as it allowed him a view of the dimming rooms beyond it.  
  
Steve’s foot hovered at the door way, taking in the way what light was left dragged shadows across the floor. The tree outside continued to knock away at the window, the shadows of it’s leaves being blown about dancing across the floor.  
  
A particularly forceful gust of wind set some of them flying from the branches like some of sort of exodus of terrified birds taking flight.  
  
The very sight of it had Steve’s heart pounding in his chest, and he found himself pondering if it was too late to find a hotel.  
  
Another scatter of leaves and then the sharp rapping of rain against the window made the decision for him, forcing him to press forward and step into the abandoned apartment.

Once the door was closed behind him he managed several steps before slumping, sliding to the floor on what had once been the living room he and Bucky had spent most of their evenings in.  
  
Steve had washed the dishes and watched from the corner of his eye most nights as his friend turned on the radio, dancing foolishly and singing off key for a rise.  
  
He had always refused Bucky a reaction, at least right away.  
  
He would hold on to it as long as he could, but in the end was always laughing and singing poorly right along with the other man.  
  
When the dishes had been clean and drying he would usually take his place by the window with a sketchpad and charcoal, drawing whatever caught his eye or was bouncing around in his head while he listened to Bucky’s stories from that day on the dock.  
  
They weren’t always particularly interesting stories, but something about the gestures of those thin, strong fingers, and the way his eyes lit up as he shared even the most mundane of things were enough to keep Steve utterly enchanted for most of the evening.

If Steve closed his eyes now, he could pretend that nothing had changed. 

He could imagine the floors weren’t a mess and the place didn’t smell from years of decay. 

He could fool himself into thinking the lights still worked and the radio was on and if he opened his eyes his best friend would be sitting there looking at him like he’d gone insane; because he must have to be sitting on the floor like that.

None of it was true though.  
  
When he opened his eyes it was dark and rotting and a shell of the home he’d once had.  
  
It didn’t really matter though, or it wouldn’t in time. He would fix this place and make it home again, so that Bucky had somewhere safe to hide and figure out who he was now for as long as he needed to.

Until that opportunity arrived though he decided that the best course of action was to sleep, and preferably not in the middle of the open living room space.  
  
He pushed himself up slowly and walked the familiar paces toward the bedroom, stopping short at the sight of the door slightly ajar.  
  
It shouldn’t have bothered him really.  
  
Seventy years had passed, there was a pretty good chance that in 70 years someone had left the door open.  
  
The logic didn’t matter though, it made his stomach turn to see it for reasons he didn’t even understand.  
  
No one was here.  
  
He hadn’t heard a peep since he’d set foot in the apartment, and yet he couldn’t shake the feeling suddenly that he was wrong and he wasn’t alone.

Back pressed to the wall in an instant he crept along, not realizing until he reached the door that he had forgotten to keep breathing.  
As he peered around the door frame the air came rushing out, both in surprise and relief. A figure lay curled in the corner, a worn baseball cap falling from their head, brown hair liberated from the confines of the cap, spilling down over a sleeping face he knew far too well.

_Bucky._

He had found his way some how, back to New York, back to _their_ home.  
  
He had come here on his own, chosen that this was where he wanted to be.  
  
The very sight of the other man had an iron grip on his heart, and yet it hadn’t felt so easy to breath in weeks. 

It felt like until that moment he had forgotten how to since discovering just who the Winter Soldier was.

The door gave the slight creak as Steve pushed it closed behind him. He took slow, steady steps across the room not wanting to startle him.

But he didn’t.

Even as he came unbelievably close.  
  
Even as he crouched down.  
  
There was a panic rising Steve’s chest at just how still Bucky was.  
  
It wasn’t until he was almost level with his friend’s closed eyes that he noticed it, flaking and white, dried around the corners of his mouth.  
  
He had seen this before.

1943 still felt like yesterday.

The day he had run down a Hydra agent who’d used a little body as a shield felt just like yesterday.

It felt like someone else calling Bucky’s name. Someone else’s hands were shaking the lifeless body that wore the face of James Barnes.

Bucky.

_BuckyBuckyBucky._

They had to know this wasn’t right, this person.  
  
Whoever it was calling Bucky’s name had to know this was some sort of trick, some sort of trap.  
  
Any minute _they_ would come. Any minute they would be there for Captain America, for Steve Rogers, the fool who believed that he could rescue the Winter Soldier.

But no one came.  
  
There were no soldiers.  
  
There were no guns.  
  
There were no shattering windows and smoke bombs.  
  
There was wind and rain and the deafening silence where Bucky’s heart should have been beating, and his lungs should have been breathing and his lips should have been curling into a smart ass grin calling him a punk.

It took too long for him to realize the voice was _his._  
  
To realize _his_ hands were shaking and his lungs were frantic and breathing had become secondary to forcing Bucky to just _wake up_.  
  
 Even longer than that was how long it took him to give up, to slump to the floor, sitting beside Bucky, and let the other man lean into his shoulder.  
  
This had been his choice, the last place in the world he would ever see.  
  
It was worn and ugly from all the years they had been away, but it was _their_ walls, _their_ shelter, _their home_.  
  
From where they sat Steve could see the words on scrawled onto wall, the last thing Bucky had wanted to see, the last things he wanted his friend to know.

In all his life Steve Rogers had never felt helpless.  
  
There had always been something, some reason to push back. There was the Avengers, and the war and the serum and Peggy. There had always been a million reasons to stand up, to fight back, to never once let who he was be the limit of what he could do.

He had always had a reason to continue being who he was, because before any of that, there had always been Bucky.

_*****_

_Steve,_

_I remember everything._  
 _I remember things I never want you to know._  
 _I would never be able to live with how you would look at me._

_I remember this whole life without you. I remember the war. I remember this apartment. I remember dinners with your mother._

_I remember things I can’t live with._  
 _You always were the strong one, punk._

_And I’m sorry that I can’t face you to tell you this. You deserve to hear the one thing that I remember most._

_I remember that I loved you,_  
 _that I always loved you._

_\- Bucky_


End file.
